Boasting that it already has more than 70,000 attendees preregistered for its Think Digital conference, IBM Corp. today is kicking off the virtual event with a more muted lineup of new product rollouts than usual highlighted by a reinvigorated set of Watson capabilities aimed at data center operations.

Despite criticism of Watson for failing to deliver on some of IBM’s more ambitious targets in industries such as healthcare, IBM maintains artificial intelligence is core to its strategy going forward. “AI sits at the top of our investment list along with cloud and quantum,” Dario Gil, director of IBM Research, said in a prebriefing with journalists.

The company was boosted by what it says has been overwhelming adoption of the Watson Assistant for Citizens service it debuted early this month and is offering free to help overwhelmed call centers respond to COVID-19-related requests. The service has been deployed in 26 countries by commercial and government organizations, cutting hour-long hold times to a few minutes, IBM said.

The newest iteration of Watson is aimed at helping information technology executives automate IT infrastructures to be more resilient to future disruptions and to help reduce costs. IBM Watson AIOps uses machine learning to detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies automatically in real time.

The service, which is available to companies of any size on a pay-as-you-go basis, “looks at all the log data on your IT systems and aggregates it to a semantic layer where we’re running AI and ML models to predict where there are going to be issues and, if an issue occurs, to resolve it,” said Rob Thomas (pictured), senior vice president of cloud and data platform at IBM. The user interface is Slack Technologies Inc.’s namesake collaboration platform so “you’re connecting to your source systems, bringing colleagues in to help and getting notifications that say, ‘We fixed this problem before it happened,’” Thomas said.

The software is built on top of the latest release of OpenShift, the version of the Kubernetes container orchestrator that IBM acquired with its purchase of Red Hat Inc. last summer. That enables Watson AIOps to run across hybrid clouds and on-premises infrastructure. It also works with popular IT monitoring systems such as those from Mattermost Inc. and ServiceNow Inc.

Preparing for 5G

Also in conjunction with Red Hat, IBM is launching new services and software to help enterprises and telecommunications companies speed their transition to edge computing using the next generation of wireless networks called 5G. Although those networks have seen limited deployments so far, Gartner Inc. expects 5G-related revenues to $4.2 billion, up nearly 90% from 2019.

For enterprises, the biggest news is IBM Edge Application Manager, which is described as an autonomous manager that enables AI, analytics and “internet of things” workloads to be deployed and remotely managed in real time with up to 10,000 edge nodes run by a single administrator.

Citing other Gartner research that predicts that half of newly deployed infrastructure over the next two years will be in edge locations rather than data centers, “It’s critical that clients be able to create own cloud-based environment at the edge,” said Hillery Hunter, chief technology officer of IBM Cloud.

In a not-too-veiled swipe at Amazon Web Services Inc. Hunter said IBM’s edge products can be deployed in a “true multicloud format. Our competitors’ edge offerings are more oriented to be an on-ramp to their public cloud so [customers are] more likely to be locked into their environment.” In contrast, IBM’s approach is based upon Open Horizon, an open-source project that “enables a single administrator to manage up to 20 times as many endpoints as other solutions,” Hunter said.

A separate but similar offering will target telecommunication firms and IBM is also edge-enabling a host of analytics, production optimization, manufacturing and wearable applications to complement the manager.

In addition to the Watson Assistant for Citizens service, IBM’s’ COVID-19-related efforts include a tracking application developed by its subsidiary, The Weather Company LLC. It has recorded more than 145 million visits since its launch in late March, Thomas said.

The company has also contributed software and technology to the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, a private-public effort to make free compute time and resources available to researchers. Finally, its 2020 Call For Code Global Challenge is targeting open-source cloud applications for crisis communication, remote education and community cooperation, with three new projects expected to be announced today.

Photo: SiliconANGLE